MERICA AND POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN CENTRAL ASIA

Bakhodyr ERGASHEV

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Bakhodyr Ergashev, D.Sc. (Philos.), professor (Tashkent, Uzbekistan)

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Political opposition in all Central Asian countries is still weak: the dissident parties and groups are not strong enough to cope with the state, their opponent, which is omnipotent. Late in the 1990s the United States realized that rather than addressing specifically European or Asian tasks, in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan it has to create a certain Eurasian model of its attitude toward their political systems. The threat of international terrorism and Islamic extremism is too real to allow Washington to treat the democratic groups in Central Asia in the same balanced way similar groups in Central and Eastern Europe are treated. Still, the White House is fully aware of the importance of the current situation in Central Asia for continued stability and order the world over.

Sources

The sources of the United States current and highly unusual attitude toward political opposition in the Central Asian republics should probably be sought in the special approaches of former U.S. President Carter and his closest circle to this opposition. As soon as the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Final Act, America, under pressure from the humanitarian basket and human dimension priorities, had to alter its previous, “Ford,” tactics. The Democratic Administration referred to the human rights issues much more often than its predecessors. The stake on deeply personal motives stalled the Soviet propaganda machine. The dissident movement, or even its shoots (in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and elsewhere), developed from pro-American into “pro-world.”

It seems that the only failure shared by two successive administrations—Jimmy Carter’s Democratic and…………………

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